


ready or not

by hudders-and-hiddles (huddersandhiddles)



Series: romance and nibblies [6]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Ficlet, Fluff, M/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Wedding Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 10:06:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18938752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/huddersandhiddles/pseuds/hudders-and-hiddles
Summary: It's the day of the wedding, and all anyone wants to know is if David is ready or not.





	ready or not

“David, are you ready?”

He looks up from where he’s positioning his boutonniere against the lapel of his jacket to find his father standing in the doorway that connects their motel rooms, dressed in his best suit and looking so proud that David’s tempted to shut the door in his face just to avoid having to see it.

“Need a hand?” Johnny asks, already stepping closer, as if David is somehow incapable of handling a straight pin.

“I can do it,” he snaps, but his father pulls the little blue-wrapped flowers from his hand anyway, holding them against his lapel as he takes the pin from David’s other hand.

“You know, son,” his father begins, and David’s already rolling his eyes at whatever unwarranted advice is surely about to follow, “it’s okay to be nervous. It’s a big day. A  _big_ day. And it’s normal if you’re, uh, perhaps feelings some... jitters...”

“I’m fine.”

“About the ceremony,” he continues, undeterred, finally working the pin through both fabric and stem. “Or the reception. Or— or even the wedding night.”

“Dad!”

If his father tries to give him a talk about the birds and the bees right now, David is literally going to walk right out the door and straight into traffic.

“I’m just saying, it’s okay to be nervous.”

“I’m not nervous!” The words are sharp and defensive, but David truly means them: he isn’t nervous. Like at all. Mostly, he just doesn’t want someone to jinx him somehow by talking about how nervous he should be.

But he isn’t, even though he really thought he would be, and maybe last night his answer would have been different, but it’s a beautiful, clear, blue day outside, and David is rather pleasantly surprised to find that he’s feeling incredibly calm about the whole thing. Whatever happens today, at the end of it all, Patrick will be his husband. About that he has absolutely zero doubt, and as that’s the only thing about all of this that actually matters, he has no reason to be nervous at all.

Johnny steps back, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Fine. Fine,” he says. “It’s just that it’s okay if you  _are_ nervous. You know, when your mother and I got married—”

“Yep. Got it. Thanks so much,” David says, pushing him back through the door and hurriedly closing it behind him. He’s nearly ready to go, if he could just get a few more minutes of peace and quiet to finish getting dressed.

“David, are you ready yet?” his mother asks, pushing her way through the just-closed door.

He squeezes his eyes and his fists shut tight and tries not to scream. “It’s hard to finish getting ready when a… a  _conga line_ keeps bursting through the door, like this is some terrible Gloria Estefan video from 1994.”

There’s a masterful kind of irony in the size of the frown his mother gives him as she replies, “Oh, stop being dramatic.”

Her gaze shifts from his face to his boutonniere as she approaches, and she reaches to unpin it before he can stop her. All he can do is throw up his hands, drop his head back between his shoulders, and glare at the ceiling as if it’s somehow the motel’s fault that his family has no sense of boundaries.

Actually, on second thought, it might be the motel’s fault—there’s certainly been far less privacy in the years that they’ve lived here together with only a flimsy excuse for a door to separate them than there ever had been when they’d had an entire mansion in which to avoid each other. He glares at the ceiling harder, just in case.

“Darling, I understand that you might be feeling rather timorous about the great unfathomable depths into which you are about to plummet—”

“I’m not ‘plummeting.’  _No one_ is plummeting into anything.”

He bats her hands away, turning back to the mirror to finish straightening his boutonniere—again—something he wouldn’t have to do if everyone would have just let him put it on himself in the first place, like he was trying to do. He shifts the tiny pair of white roses until they’re running parallel to the crisp edge of his lapel and pins them firmly in place.

Behind him, his mother places her hands on his shoulders, meeting his gaze in the mirror. The smile she gives him isn’t the polite, plastic one she normally trots out for the masses; it’s warm and real and just a little wistful.

“Your Patrick is very lucky.”

I’m pretty sure I’m the lucky one, David thinks.

It’s a sweet moment, the rare kind in which his mother is thinking of someone other than herself. And then Alexis bursts in from their parents’ room, a frantic blur of silvery-blue charmeuse, and David thinks maybe he’s not so lucky after all.

“Oh my god, David, why aren’t you ready?”

“I don’t know! Maybe it’s all these unnecessary interruptions!”

Moira shakes her head at her arguing children and disappears back through the virtual revolving door between their rooms, leaving David to deal with this harassment alone—she always was good at abandoning him when he needed her most.

“You’re not actually leaving for the ceremony with your hair looking like that, are you?” Alexis asks, and David just manages to duck out of the way of her meddlesome, well-manicured fingers. They follow him as he crosses the room, and he swats at them every time they buzz too close.

“My hair is fine! My boutonniere is fine! My nerves are fine! Everything is fine!”

Her hands drop dramatically, as her eyebrows rocket higher. “It doesn’t  _sound_ fine.” She leans in conspiratorially. “Do you have cold feet? Are you worried you’re not going to be a good husband?”

“Swallow your tongue please.”

He drops onto his bed to swap his slippers for his dress shoes, and she falls into place across from him, just like old times. He can feel her gaze as he ties his laces, but she doesn’t say anything until he’s done. “This is going to be good for you,” she tells him, and even though he doesn’t need the reassurance, he appreciates that she’s trying. It’s better than her trying to fix his hair anyway.

“Knock, knock,” comes Stevie’s voice through the opening front door. “Are you—”

“Ready! Yes, I’m ready!” David yells, fed up with everyone asking.

“Oh, I don’t care about that,” Stevie replies. “I just wanted to make sure you were decent because I have  _no_ desire to see that ever again.”

“Ooh, burn, David,” Alexis chimes in, but David ignores her.

“You’re sweet,” he tells Stevie. His tone is scathing, but honestly, he could kiss her for just being so relentlessly normal right now.

“And you’re almost late. So get in the damn car already.”

He stands and throws the last of his things back into the overnight bag he’d brought with him to stay at the motel last night. “Since when do you care about being on time?”

“I don’t,” she says, “but you set  _six_ reminders on my phone, and I’m afraid you might have somehow rigged it to blow up if I ignore another one.”

David zips up his bag and follows Stevie to the door, while Alexis swans back off into their parents’ room. With any luck, this will be the last morning he ever wakes up in this room. It should be a relief, but he’s feeling oddly sentimental about it now that it’s here. He’d first met Stevie when asking for extra towels so he could take a shower in this tiny, disgusting bathroom. He’d comforted Alexis for the first time in a long, long while after her break-up with Mutt, right here between these beds. He’d kissed Patrick for the first time in his car in the parking lot just outside this door. For as much as he’d never wanted it to be, this motel room is his home, and taking the last step out the door is just as hard as the last step he’d ever taken out of the house that had been ripped from beneath their feet.

“If you start crying, I’m leaving you on the side of the road, and I really don’t think Patrick will forgive me for that.”

With a laugh, David pulls the door closed and climbs into the passenger seat of Stevie’s car. She throws herself into the driver seat, no more careful than usual despite the floor-length navy gown and four-inch heels she’s sporting. It’s good to know that some things never change.

The short drive to Town Hall is blissfully silent—no needless questions or unwelcome advice—and David is more thankful than she can possibly know that he’s ended up with her as his best friend. She drops him off near the back of the building, nodding her head toward a cluster of trees as they get out of the car. “Go get him,” is all she says, and then she’s purposefully striding off in the opposite direction to wrangle the last few guests into the building.

Patrick is waiting for him in the shade of a towering elm tree, looking gorgeous in a suit that matches the one David’s wearing, and as soon as their eyes meet, his entire face lights up with delight. He’s beautiful—all the time, but especially like this, dressed to the nines and looking just as giddy and hopeful and joyously incandescent as David feels.

“Hi,” he says when he finds himself face to face with his fiancé for the last time.

“Hi,” Patrick echoes, and the smile on his face could power whole cities. David’s pretty sure his own could, too. “You clean up well.”

One shoulder tilts up in a coy little shrug. “Oh, I just threw something on.”

The glint in Patrick’s eye grows more mischievous as he leans closer and slips his hands beneath the edges of David’s lapels. “So you wouldn’t mind if it gets a bit wrinkled then.” And he drags David in for a searing kiss, leaving him breathless and starry-eyed when he finally pulls away again.

David forces himself to think about all the people waiting for them just inside in order to keep from throwing Patrick onto the nearest horizontal surface and continuing what they’ve started. God, he can’t wait to marry this man. With a deep breath, he closes his eyes and dips his forehead to rest against Patrick’s.

“I missed you last night, button.”

Patrick threads their fingers together. “I missed you, too, best.”

David could almost live in this moment forever, standing here together on the cliff-edge of their future, the entire world at their feet, thrumming with possibility. However, he has a sneaking suspicion that the night, that  _life_ only gets better from here. And so when music starts playing on the speakers inside Town Hall, he opens his eyes and lets Patrick lead him around to the front of the building, right on cue.

At the top of the front steps, Patrick pauses, turning to David with his serious face on. It’s the one he uses when he tries to explain about profit margins or when he’s running late in the morning and has to pull David’s fingers from the waistband of his jeans for the third time in a row. “Are we ready to do this?” he asks.

David knows that it’s an actual question. He knows that if he said no, even after all these months of planning, even with all the excitement clearly vibrating under Patrick’s skin, if David said he wasn’t ready right now, Patrick would lead him to the car and take him home and they’d figure out what to do next instead, and David loves him all the more for it.

But for David it’s not a question at all. There’s no single part of him—not a finger or a little toe, not a freckle, not a hair, not a skin cell, not an atom—that isn’t ready to marry Patrick Brewer. He’s never been more ready for anything in his entire life.

He leans in to press one more kiss to his fiancé’s tidy little mouth, lingering there a bit, breathing all his certainty and his anticipation into this happy press of lips. And maybe he slips him a little tongue, too; after all, if it’s going to be their last as fiancés, it should at least be a good one.

When they part, Patrick is smiling, bold and bright as the sun shining on their shoulders, and he takes David’s hand in his. “Let’s go get married,” David tells him, and hand-in-hand, side-by-side, together they open the doors.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I was thinking a lot about how the little conversation from "Friends & Family" right before the soft launch ("Are we ready to do this?" "Open the doors.") might come back around again, and this was the fluffy result. And anyway, who doesn't love thinking about the wedding?
> 
> You can find me on tumblr as [wild-aloof-rebel](http://wild-aloof-rebel.tumblr.com) (my Schitt's Creek blog) or [hudders-and-hiddles](http://hudders-and-hiddles.tumblr.com) (my main).


End file.
